Joe Riddle has a simple but good post up at Ex-Gay Watch about one of my pet peeves: the way ex-gays (at least, those whose profiles are published as inspirational) tend to blame homosexuality for all their hang-ups:

Blaming the “gay community” sure seems like a convenient way for them to avoid taking responsibilty for their own behavior, dontcha think? Still, there’s probably a kernel of truth there… Chances are, their gay friends were not questioning their reckless behavior, and in fact may have been enabling it. Sometimes we out gays are reluctant to encourage responsible behavior in our friends because we don’t want to be viewed as another moralizing voice. While the “gay community” isn’t responsible for the bad choices of Paulk, Bennett, et al, it’s possilbe we did contribute to driving them into the arms of the ex-gay movement. If I thought my only options were to be a drug-addicted slut or ex-gay, I’d choose ex-gay every time.

Sure, so would I; but the nurturing, supportive part of the gay community that brings out the best in you is there (and not as icky as that description makes it sound). I found it without having to look terribly hard. My friends are perfectly capable of encouraging responsible behavior without turning into sanctimonious hard-asses.

If there are people who can’t handle their homosexuality, then I seriously wish them the best in celibacy or learned heterosexuality or whatever allows them to live happier lives. But I have no patience with those who act as if all the non-sex-dungeon hang-outs and non-abusive boyfriends were somehow in hiding and could only be discovered with superhuman effort and an oscillating electron microscope. That’s malarkey. If drawn to nothing but ephemeral pleasures and exploitative people, you’ve got more fundamental problems than being gay.

Oh, and this is what I really wanted to read the day before Atsushi flies in for the weekend:

In an astonishing admission aimed at explaining its troubled record in recent months, Japan Airlines on Thursday said safety had not been its top priority.

All efforts and attention were focused on punctuality. The airline was careless about safety, JAL said in a report to the transport ministry on steps it is taking to restore its tarnished reputation.

Anyone who flies out of Haneda knows that, whatever JAL is achieving by giving inspections short shrift, it ain’t punctuality, so exactly what is really being prioritized, one would like to know? Perhaps all those little screw-ups lately have been a blessing in disguise. They haven’t caused any fatalities, but they’ve been serious enough to get the attention of the government:

And in a case of worst-possible timing, part of the flap from the wing of a JAL aircraft that landed at Narita International Airport on Thursday was found to have fallen off in flight, officials said.

Flight 73, carrying 428 passengers and crew members, arrived at 5:10 p.m. from Honolulu.

Mechanics found the component had detached from the main left wing.

The airport’s 4,000-meter runway that the aircraft used was closed for three minutes from 6 p.m. to search for the missing part. It was not found.

JAL said the mishap did not compromise flight safety.

Upon receiving JAL’s report, officials of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said they will regularly inspect facilities and airports used by the airline to confirm that the company’s safety measures are being observed.

The ministry also grounded a JAL pilot for one month beginning today for starting takeoff procedures without clearance from air traffic control at New Chitose Airport near Sapporo. The pilot of the Tokyo-bound flight was forced to abort takeoff at the last moment in January because another aircraft had just landed on the runway about a kilometer away.

In another incident, at Inchon Airport in South Korea, the pilot and co-pilot of a flight bound for Narita misheard the control tower’s instructions to wait, and taxied onto the runway, forcing another plane to restart landing procedures.

Reprimands or warnings were issued in both incidents.

On March 17, a clearly fed-up transport ministry ordered JAL to improve its operations.

Yes, that would be most obliging.

The lower house of the Diet’s exploratory committee on constitutional revision has come to a resolution:

On the morning of 15 April, the committee (Taro Nakayama, Chair), made up of members from the LDP, DPJ, and Komeito, approved by majority vote a finalized report summarizing 5 years of debate. They clarified in detail the necessity of revising the preamble and Article 9, in which Japan renounces war powers. This is the first time the Diet has demonstrated intent to revise the constitution since 1947, when the present constitution went into effect. Also manifested [in the proposal] are the intention to make reforms on a broad range of other issues, such as stipulating environmental rights and redistricting prefectures into larger administrative regions.

Bear in mind that this is the lower house committee, so there’s no guarantee that the bill won’t be nearly unrecognizable by the time it’s voted on in the houses. The upper house committee, for its part, is expected to come to a resolution on 20 April.


Added on 16 April: The Nikkei evening edition had a chart I didn’t feel like translating before going out last night, but there’s an English article in the Mainichi that lists things pretty well. The part that’s relevant to the SDF is here:

The principle of renouncing war as a means to settle international disputes, which is provided for in Clause 1, Article 9, should be retained, according to a majority opinion. The report says a majority of members “appreciate the role that Article 9 has played in ensuring Japan’s peace and prosperity.”



However, it does not rule out the possibility that the article will be amended to clearly provide for minimum use of force to defend Japan from possible military attacks.



The report shows that the commission was divided over whether Japan should be allowed to participate in collective self-defense arrangements.



Some demand that Japan be allowed to participate in collective defense arrangements without limitations, while other panel members said some limitations should be placed on Japan’s involvement in such arrangements. Another group said the Constitution should ban Japan’s involvement in it.

Japan’s codified renunciation of war is one of the biggest sticking points in its bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

It’s nice to see stories like this:

Sen. Paul Koering, who publicly revealed Wednesday that he is gay, received nothing but kindness from his colleagues on the Senate floor today.

He was greeted with hugs and handshakes from both conservative Republican and liberal Democratic senators and from moderates of both parties. Many of the senators said they have long known of the Fort Ripley Republican’s sexual orientation.

Koering, who was described as a teddy bear by several other Senators, was beaming Thursday and told one Senate colleague that he felt liberated.

No kidding, buddy. The truth shall make you free, to coin a phrase.

I do look forward to the day when the tone of these stories carries a bit less astonishment about people’s goodwill–you could almost headline this one “State Senator not shot by fellow Republicans after outing self.” But progress is progress.

The US government plans to survey Okinawans about how they view US bases:

The committee is attempting to determine which bases on U.S. soil should be closed to improve the efficiency of defense operations under an inquiry ordered by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

It plans to complete a draft proposal in May and seek approval from Congress in autumn.

The plan is expected to meet with strong opposition since many regional economies in the United States depend on military bases.

Okinawa’s relationship with the US military is more complicated. It’s Japan’s least wealthy prefecture, and our bases add to the economy. At the same time, crime and high-handedness have accompanied our presence there, and Okinawans are more outspoken than your average Japanese; the survey report should be an interesting read, whatever effect it does or does not ultimately have on troop realignments.

ROK President Roh Moo-hyun addressed South Korean residents in Germany this week and made some statements that are…well, here’s what he said:

“North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear programs,” Roh told the meeting in Germany.

He said Pyongyang and Washington distrusted each other but were in agreement on how to resolve the problem — security guarantees and economic aid for the North in return for dismantling its nuclear programs.

“They don’t seem to trust each other,” Roh said. “But distrust is not a problem of substance, so it will be resolved if you talk long enough,” he said.

Is that a fact? I understand that he was probably trying to soothe the homefolks–and the part about not encouraging the collapse of the DPRK certainly makes sense, since it would do all kinds of nasty things to the ROK economy–but whenever a politician says something wacky, there’s always a scary chance that he actually believes it. I mean, maybe the connotation is different in Korean, but “distrust is not a problem of substance” strikes me as quixotic in this situation. So does “North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear programs.”

BTW, did you hear what Condi said about the current state of the Axis of Evil? I liked this part: “I do think the North Koreans have been, frankly, a little bit disappointed that people are not jumping up and down and running around with their hair on fire because (they) have been making these pronouncements.” Yes. Laboring under the assumption that we’ll actually convince North Korea to dump its nuclear arms program would be pretty dimwitted, but there’s a line to be trod: we can’t freak out at its antics, but working to keep negotiations going makes the DPRK feel respected and decreases the chances that it’s going to do anything psycho on an international level.

You know how the Japan Post privatization proposal was presented to the LDP last week? It’s still, not unpredictably, stuck there:

A group of 101 Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers met Wednesday to reiterate their opposition to the government’s postal privatization plan and ruled out any compromise on the issue.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi meanwhile renewed his pledge not to change the postal reform framework adopted by his Cabinet earlier this month.

The standoff between Koizumi and his opponents in the LDP, of which he is president, is making it increasingly difficult for the government to meet its goal of submitting its postal privatization bills to the Diet by the end of the month.

At Wednesday’s meeting, organized and chaired by former House of Representatives Speaker Tamisuke Watanuki, the lawmakers adopted a resolution opposing the government’s plan and released their own outline to reform Japan Post while keeping it a semigovernmental corporation.

Someday when my stomach is less on edge, we’ll talk about Japanese semi-governmental corporations in all their resource-hoovering glory. Suffice it to say that, while “semi-governmental” sounds like a nice, friendly compromise, in execution it ends up increasing the number of people who have access to the goodies and decreasing the number of people who feel compelled to husband them. The Sankei did report that not everyone who went to Watanuki’s “study session” last week symptathized with his anti-privatization position (one is cited as saying that because he’d received his invitation from the leaders of his faction, he felt unable to refuse it). But there were 96 Diet attendees there, and 101 who joined him in his resolution this week, so maybe he was pretty persuasive.

In any case, Prime Minister Koizumi has been adamant that the proposal not be doctored before officially becoming a Diet bill. The deadline he set was the end of April, so there’s still plenty of time for fun.

There’s been another mix-up of patient records at a hospital, with tragic results:

A 70-year-old man died in March following a misdiagnosis brought about when his CAT scan results were accidentally switched with those of another patient at a hospital in Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Tuesday. Hospital authorities have denied responsibility for the man’s death.

The man, from Numazu, died of a cerebral hemorrhage two days after being taken to the hospital and given the CAT scan following complaints of difficulty swallowing. The results of his scan were accidentally switched with those of another patient who underwent the scan the previous day.

According to hospital officials, the cranial CAT scan was performed on the man immediately after he arrived at the hospital. The technician, however, accidentally gave the wrong scan results to the man’s attending physician, leading to a misdiagnosis that the man had suffered a stroke.

This sort of thing is not at all uncommon–a famous mix-up at a Yokohama hospital led to heart and lung surgeries being performed on the wrong patients–and I wonder whether its roots lie in more than just the way health care, specifically, is run.

Everyone in Japan who works for a decent-sized company has found life somewhat reordered by the new laws, which went into effect this month, governing the handling of personal information. Because Japan is famous for order, carefulness, and semi-conductors, people often make the easy assumption that the handling of information here must be first-rate; but in many ways it’s not. Japanese offices are full of clutter–folders and vertical files and post-it notes piled everywhere are a common sight. True, any office anywhere in the world that hasn’t been prepped for a magazine shoot is going to look worked-in, and because space is at a premium here, separate rooms or closets to keep unattractive piles of paper hidden away are less easy to manage. It’s still true, though, that most Japanese prefer the traditional use of paper documentation and name-stamp approvals to computerized MIS. Most documents go through many hands on their way to being approved or filed, and Japan has had relatively little crime since the war, so it’s not uncommon for documents that contain personal information to be lying about all over the place because there aren’t any policies to prevent it.

Oddly, while information tends to go through many people vertically up and down chains of command, it often isn’t shared horizontally. The in-group consciousness can mean that marketing departments don’t always know what their own R&D people are creating, or how to communicate to them what the customers would like it to do.

Of course, computers aren’t perfect either, and territoriality is not a trait the Japanese invented, as we all know. But so many of the problems you hear about in Japanese health care seem to result not from garden-variety incompetence or questionable judgment but from a specific mishandling of documents: mixing up patients’ charts, not reading warnings about an employee’s conduct, not having received the crucial information in report A. Apparently, the hospitals are run less like the rest of the domestic economy.

So something has come of those plans for Japan to seek help from Israel in upgrading its defense capabilities (via Gaijin Biker). Good. Ever since it was first announced, I’d been hoping more information indicating that plans had materialized would be forthcoming. It’s taken a few months, but I’m glad it’s here. It looks as if equipment, as well as procedure, may be included.

The Connecticut House has passed its civil unions bill. The governor hadn’t threatened a veto, but she had supported an amendment (eventually added) to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Following the House vote Rell issued a statement saying, “I am pleased that the House of Representatives passed this amendment and made it clear that while we will recognize and support civil unions, marriage in Connecticut is defined as the union of a man and a woman.

“Passage of this bill will extend civil rights to all couples, no matter their gender, and send the unmistakable message that discrimination in any form is unacceptable in Connecticut.”

Good for them.